★ “At seventeen, you also desperately wanted to die. You didn't go through with it. Your student did...” A major new work from Wu Xiaole, marking ten years since her debut, plunging straight into the silent truths of youth and death.
★Rights sold: Film rights, Korean rights, Simplified Chinese rights
★ A landmark tenth-anniversary novel: Written with the force of “taking the entrance exam four times,” this weighty work represents a significant milestone in the author's creative career.
★ Return to the educational arena: A sharp observation of learning struggles, teacher-student dynamics, and peer relationships in the new generation, continuing the deep social concern first seen in Your Children Are Not Your Children.
★ Generational replication and parent-child destruction: Explores the questions—“How do generations replicate themselves? How do parents and children destroy each other?” Ten years later, is it still true that “your children are not your children”?
★ The mystery of a girl's death: Using the suicide of a student at an elite girls' school as its starting point, the novel peels back the inner world of a teenage girl, while simultaneously reflecting the protagonist's own unhealed youthful wounds.

The girl refuses to emerge from her cocoon into butterfly form, preferring only to sleep silently within it.

“At seventeen, I desperately wanted to die. It was the only way I could take control of my own life.”
“Why? You just lost your will to live like that?”
“Only then would I never have to worry again about failing to live up to some image of what I should be.”

Wu Yiguang never expected to live past seventeen. She never imagined she would become a teacher. And she could never have predicted that thirty-eight minutes after the final bell, her student would jump from the rooftop. By the time she arrived at the scene, the girl was already gone. But the gathered crowd of parents, the large pool of blood on the ground, and the distant, fading siren of the ambulance all made Wu Yiguang believe—a silent, harsh judgment against her had already begun.

The girl's death plunged this century-old elite girls' school into anxiety. The students, usually so skilled at producing correct answers on exams, found themselves unable to respond to the barrage of questions about death: What happened to her? How were her grades? What was her psychological state? What kind of unlivable life led her to take that leap, ending seventeen years of existence? Teachers and students alike urgently needed an answer—whether to dispel doubts, to deal with the media, or to draw clear lines of responsibility and reassure themselves that her death had nothing to do with them.

As the girl's homeroom teacher, Wu Yiguang tries to uncover the reasons behind her student's suicide—to find an answer for others, and for herself. An answer that is reasonable, certain, and reassuring. She finds clues in the girl's ordinary life, but with each inquiry, she repeatedly digs up her own dilemmas: her hollow marriage to her husband, her mother who controls every aspect of her life, and the self that should have been destroyed long ago.

That self speaks back to her: “At seventeen, you also desperately wanted to die. You didn't go through with it. Your student did...”

“I'm sorry. I thought I had survived. But I never did.”

Wu Xiaole

Born in Taichung in 1989. Graduated from the Law Department of National Taiwan University. Loves parrots. Her works include Your Children Are Not Your Children (adapted into a TV series of the same name, streamed globally on Netflix), Privileged Children, We Have No Secrets, But I Just Don't Like It, Fatal Login, and others.

Known for her calm, nuanced touch in dissecting social issues and the hidden recesses of the human heart, she is a phenomenon-level bestselling author in the Chinese-speaking world.